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Game Design

Its own reward?

I often wonder what games are trying to say. Playing Fallout 3 I’ve found myself receiving an explicit reward simply for finding a new location. The fact that there might be new items, characters and quests in that location, or that the act of exploration itself might be rewarding isn’t consider a strong enough incentive. The game decides that I need to gain some experience points for the act of exploring.

I appreciate the experience gain but am left wondering what message I am supposed to take from it. Does the game believe that my attention span is such that without a constant stream of reward I will stop playing? That in game rewards are not a compelling enough reason to keep playing? That fun is directly proportional to personal gain?

One clear subtext seems to be that nothing should be its own reward, that exploration is not an end in itself but a means. A lesson potentially learnt from World of Warcraft where everything seems to be a means to an end that never arrives.

13 replies on “Its own reward?”

The moment after I posted I started to wonder if maybe it was simply something about Fallout 3 that made it seem strange? One of my favourite games is Crackdown and it consistently rewards you for climbing buildings and exploring the environment.

I think it’s a similar reaction to what I had with the Karma system, which is that the consequences, rewards are already handled in game (New areas mean new characters, new items and new quests.). So does there need to be an extra system on top?

Another interesting way to look at it would be that it takes away from the experience points you would receive killing off some creature or person.

Instead, here you are provided with a way of progressing your character, especially with one of the later perks being explorer. It seems that not only are we given multiple ways to reach level 20 (I did so long before I ever start back on the main quest), but are encouraged to explore as much as possible.

On the other hand, the experience points are so negligible, it seems odd. You mean picking that easy lock gained me as much experience?

In all, I actually find myself frustrated with the level cap. It’s making me question the leveling system, as I’ve been playing well over twenty hours at level 20, which begs the question of whether or not I’m progressing anymore? Is that the point of an RPG?

Well, it does make sense in way, since you learn something from finding a place (could be thought of as a representation of the navigation and hardship required to reach your destination), and it gives a more peaceful player a way to level up, albeit slowly.

@Denis: It depends if you gauge progression in a RPG as the number of experience points you have accumulated, or the number of experiences you have accumulated.

I’m reminded of one of the goals Warren Spector had for Deus Ex, which was that the game would reward achieving a goal but not the means by which it was achieved. So if a room needed to be entered then you’d get XP for being in the room, regardless of whether you blew the door up, picked the lock, or talked somebody into giving you the key.

It still gave an incentive for getting into the room, but allowed each player to approach it in their own manner.

The same could be said for killing people. Why do I need to be rewarded the same XP for sniping someone at long range when they hadn’t even noticed me, as if I waltzed in with a baseball bat, or if they creepjack me? All 3 scenarios have different experiences and are dealt with in different ways.

I think it’s indicative of the experience system as a whole. If you have a system in place to track your experiences in an authorative way, it has to be complete. There is no point saying that you get XP from only killing people unless your whole game is only about killing people (CoD4?). In Fallout you could be shooting, lockpicking, hacking, exploring, talking, completing tasks, etc. All are valid choices from a game design perspective and so must remain valid in a system that measures your experience.

Maybe, like the karma system, we’re now approaching a level of detail and story that it no longer requires complex systems that make overt judgement over your performance. I recall after playing a few solid years of AD&D that we eventually threw away the book and let the DM lead us on a merry adventure. You didn’t need to know that only 300 more XP was needed to get to the next level, the DM would get NPCs to inspect you and allow training in new techniques if you have proven mastery over your current techniques. We didn’t need a character sheet, we didn’t need dice, just our imagination. Are games at that point? Nope, but maybe they are closer than we think if we’re questioning the need for them to rely on arbitrary monitoring systems to measure performance.

I am starting to think that exploration is, and should be, it’s own reward. It has been increasingly frustrating to me that Fallout 3 has been so liberal in it’s handouts – both in items and XP. I mean, hello?, It’s a flippin’ nuclear wasteland why on earth is there stuff just lying around on the ground?! 50 years of scavengers should have sorted all that out!

I feel another blog post coming on…

Iroquois; I agree, the environments themselves are the reward. Which is why I find the XP icing to be a little unnecessary.

In defense of Fallout 3 (and I’m going to have to play the role of defender, because I’ve been obsessed with the game for two weeks now), I’m going to echo denis here. The XP allotted for discovering new locations is pretty meager, it’s not a huge amount.

Even though I’ve hit the level cap what’s keeping me engrossed in the game is just the lure of finding these new locations and seeing what’s happened. Even is those parts where there aren’t any new quests, the designers did a great job of giving each location its own feel. Finding out these little narratives they build into the environment is the reward, not the XP.

I’ve been thinking about a few areas of this conversation lately, namely exploration rewards and experience point rewards generally.

Traditionally, games would often have dead ends to explore, usually with some sort of material reward at the end (COG tags, treasure, special weapons, health/stat boosts, etc.). A number of games have encouraged exploration by having NPCs hire player-characters as surveyors/cartographers. A number of games recently seem to be going back the other way, by limiting time to explore or simply adding enemies while removing the reward (I’m thinking here of Left 4 Dead and Gears 2). These design choices, I feel, do convey meaning.

Perhaps one of the most obvious endorsements of exploration is this XP bonus. The game is telling the character, “You are a now a slightly better person for having ventured off the beaten path.” Certainly the “better” depends on what that XP can be spent on. Perhaps exploration benefits the Vault Dweller by adding a certain wisdom of experience, or a more robust physique.

Generally speaking, XP rewards tag their triggers as being part of some worthy experience. I find this troubling in games that mostly reward “grinding” enemies for XP, as this implies that the main method of becoming a more potent individual (smarter, faster, stronger, etc., based on how the player chooses to allocate points, assuming an allocation-based skill system) is via violence.

You know what? I never even noticed that I got a little XP boost when I found a new area. I heard the “cha-ching!” but I thought that was just the location being added to my World Map. So from my point of view, finding new locations really is its own reward, because I’m still playing the game and I’m still eager to go and explore.

It’s strange that you’ve posted this because I’ve been thinking about exactly the same thing recently.

We’re all losing focus on the POINT of doing something… or atleast what SHOULD be the point.

For example, I use Last.fm to record everytime I listen to an mp3. It also records anything I listen to on my iPod so I can go back at anytime and see what music I listened to most in a particular month or year.

Recently I’ve found myself AVOIDING listening to specific music if I know I have no way to “scrobble” the track and have it added to my overall total. So obviously I’ve lost track of what really matters. Where once I was totally happy to listen to music simply for the experience of listening I’m now unhappy unless the little counter I’ve assigned myself goes up 1 point.

I think WOW is exactly the same. Personally I enjoy exploring the new areas so I don’t think the game is totally worthless but I do think that alot of people wouldn’t be playing if it wasn’t all so easily quantifiable.

You know what’s its own reward? Conquering something. Remove all the items and xp and so on, and what you have left is pure intrinsic motivation. Something becomes its own reward when you’re doing it for no other reason than because its your objective.

That’s only true for a subset of people. The act of completing a task as an intrinsic reward in and of itself is not something everybody is motivated by.

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